A Word In Your Shell-Like. Nigel Rees
she had helped organize and pay for the overhaul of the Democratic party. The president-elect owed her a big one.’ DOAS points out that a ‘big one’ is also a $1,000 bill (from gambling) [£100 in the UK] and a nursery euphemism for a bowel movement. Partridge/Slang has ‘big one’ or ‘big ‘un’ for ‘a notable person’ and dates it from between 1800 and 1850. Pierce Egan in Boxiana (1829) has: ‘Jem had now reduced the “big one” to his own weight, and had also placed him upon the stand-still system.’
(a) big shot A powerful man, especially in the worlds of crime, politics and business. Of American origin, since about 1929, it carries a suggestion of disapproval. From Norman Lewis, The Honoured Society (1964): ‘By 1914, and the outbreak of the First World War, Zu Calo was the undisputed head of the Mafia of the province of Caltanisetta, and as such, in Mafia jargon, a pezzo di novanta [gun of ninety] – a term of honour derived from an unwieldy but impressive piece of siege artillery of the epoch of Garibaldi, firing a shell 90 millimetres in diameter (hence the translated Americanism, “big shot”)…’
(the) big sleep A synonym for death, as in the title of the novel The Big Sleep (1939; filmed US 1946 and 1977) by Raymond Chandler.
(the) Big Yin Nickname of Billy Connolly, the Scots comedian (b. 1942). It means ‘Big One’ and probably derives from a routine he did in the early 1970s called ‘Last Supper and Crucifixion’ in which he referred to Christ as such.
Bill’s mother’s See IT’S DARK.
(the) Bill See OLD BILL.
bill stickers will be prosecuted Form of words that used to appear on advertisement hoardings or board fencing in the UK in an attempt to discourage fly-posting. The notice is shown in a Punch cartoon in the edition of 26 April 1939. The term ‘billsticker’ has been known since 1774 at least. Perhaps the phrase has fallen out of use because of the graffitoed addition, recorded in the 1970s: ‘…Bill Stickers is innocent.’
Bingo! A generalized exclamation on achieving anything, similar to ‘Eureka!’. In 1919, at a carnival near Jacksonville, Florida, Edwin Lowe saw people playing what they called ‘bean-o’ – putting beans on a numbered card. This game of chance was already established elsewhere under the names ‘Keno’, ‘Loo’, and ‘Housey-Housey’. Lowe developed the idea and launched a craze that netted him a fortune. One of his friends stuttered, ‘B–b–bingo!’ on winning, and that is how the game is said to have got its name. The word had already been applied to brandy in the 17th century, but – as a result of this development from ‘bean-o’ – it turned not only into an exclamation on winning Lowe’s game but also into a generalized cry of success.
bird See GET THE.
(the) birds of the air This is essentially a biblical phrase – for example, Matthew 8:20: ‘The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.’ However, it makes a later notable appearance in the rhyme ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ (first recorded in the 18th century): ‘All the birds of the air / Fell a-sighing and a-sobbing, / When they heard the bell toll / For poor Cock Robin.’ The Birds of the Air is the title of a novel (1980) by Alice Thomas Ellis. A variant is ‘fowl(s) of the air’ (Genesis 1:26), though much more commonly one finds ‘fowls of the heavens’ in (mostly) the Old Testament. The ‘fish(es) of the sea’ occurs at least three times in the Old Testament (e.g. Genesis 1:26). ‘All the beasts of the forest’ is biblical, too (Psalms 104:20), though more frequent is beasts of the field (e.g. Psalms 8:7).
birth pangs Denoting initial difficulties in any sphere of activity, as though comparable to those experienced when a mother gives birth. Date of origin unknown. ‘The inevitable transformation of universities everywhere into “multi-versities” is being achieved with appalling birth pangs in the University of California’ – The Guardian (30 November 1968); ‘The boom in DIY retailing in the 1980s had been fuelled by the growth in home ownership and the number of house moves. Once that engine was switched off, retail price wars and “20pc off everything” promotions followed. Do It All, still in its painful birth pangs, was thrust into the firing line’ – The Daily Telegraph (7 May 1994).
bishop See AS THE BISHOP; BASH THE; DO YOU KNOW.
Bisto See AHH!
bitch See EVERY DOG.
(the) bitch-goddess Success This phrase was coined by the American psychologist William James (1842–1910) in a letter to H. G. Wells (11 September 1906): ‘The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success. That – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success – is our national disease.’ In Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), D. H. Lawrence uses the term ‘bitch-goddess Success’ on no fewer than ten occasions – and then attributes it to William James’s brother, Henry…
(to) bite the bullet Meaning, ‘to face up to adversity with courage’. The phrase probably derives from the days of field surgery in battle before anaesthesia was available. A wounded man would literally be given a bullet to bite on to distract him from the pain. ‘Brace up and bite the bullet. I’m afraid I’ve bad news for you’ – P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves, Chap. 2 (1923).
bite the dust See KICK THE BUCKET.
bitter See ALL.
(the) bitter end Meaning, ‘the last extremity; the absolute limit’, and a common phrase by the mid-19th century. Bitterness doesn’t really enter into it: the nautical ‘bitt’ is a bollard on the deck of a ship around which cables and ropes are wound. The end of the cable that is wrapped round or otherwise secured to the bollard is the ‘bitter end’. On the other hand, ends have – for possibly longer – been described as bitter in other senses. Proverbs 5:4 has: ‘But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword’. ‘The rather shallow stretch of water we call “la Manche” has always masked a gaping chasm of a different sort – between the island and the Continent (what a strange word!) in general, and France in particular. Right to the bitter end, some island fundamentalists have feared that the tunnel will bring some foreign plague or other, be it rabies, frogs’ legs or garlic’ – The Guardian (6 May 1994); ‘The maverick anti-Maastricht MP, Denzil Davies, indicated that he would continue fighting for nominations until the bitter end. The former Treasury minister and MP for Llanelli is not expected to attract more than a handful’ – The Independent (16 June 1994).
bitter experience An inevitable pairing of words. Date of origin unknown. A cliché by the 1920s/30s and listed in The Independent (24 December 1994) as a cliché of newspaper editorials. ‘Breeders know from bitter experience that matings do not always “nick” and that…they are sure to suffer many a disappointment’ – The Daily Telegraph (4 January 1971); ‘The bitter experience of 1960 affected Nixon deeply. Watergate was born in the way the Kennedys and the Kennedy money treated him then. Nobody was ever going to cheat him again’ – The Scotsman (2 May 1994); ‘The battery alone in my laptop weighs just marginally less than the combined weight of a Psion computer and modem – and I know from bitter experience you always have to carry at least one spare battery’ – Lloyd’s List (28 June 1994).
black See ANY COLOUR; AS BLACK.
(the) blackboard jungle One of several phrases that suggest that there are urban areas where the ‘law of the jungle’ may apply – in this case, the educational system. The Blackboard Jungle was the title of a novel (1954; film US 1955) by Evan Hunter. Earlier, there had been W. R. Burnett’s novel The Asphalt Jungle (1949), though OED2 finds that phrase in use in 1920. A little later, in 1969, came references to ‘the concrete jungle’.
(a) black box After a plane crash there